What you're looking for sounds like AppImages (https://appimage.org/) . I have only used them while downloading games from itch.io, etc. (since I prefer package managers) but they seem to work out of the box on popular distros. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago

Ideally a new instance of the application is installed for each user. This also provides better isolation if one user upgrades/removes/breaks their application instance. I, for one, have really come around to the AppImage model [0] in the last couple of years. [0] https://appimage.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

There is AppImage[1], which packs a lot of stuff into a SquashFS filesystem, appends it to the executable, so everything is in one file. [1] https://appimage.org. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago

Nah I think yall just hating appimage. Real gold standard. Source: 11 months ago

Although I haven't used plugins feature myself yet, this does sound like the perfect use case for them. Not every patient needs to access every single source. With plugins you can load only the source (or few sources) that they actually need. You can still use something like https://appimage.org/ to give them "a single binary", but will actually contain your slim binary and all the plugins. Source: 11 months ago

As a side note, I use the trizen AUR helper program to install AUR packages because one of it's nice features over yay, etc, is that it by default shows the content of the PKGBUILD and any other files (patches etc) for an AUR package, so you can see or edit them before installing a package. Source: almost 3 years ago